


Five Shared to One That's Not

by katajainen



Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: 5+1 Things, Brothers 'Ri Feels, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Married Fluff, Nwalin Week 2017, POV Alternating, POV Outsider, Sparring, Spymaster Nori (Tolkien)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-23
Updated: 2017-05-23
Packaged: 2018-11-04 01:42:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10980720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katajainen/pseuds/katajainen
Summary: Five things Dwalin and Nori have in common, and one they don't.





	Five Shared to One That's Not

**Author's Note:**

> For Nwalin week 2017 Day 1 Prompt: Birds of a Feather/Opposites Attract.
> 
> (And would have posted it yesterday, only it Didn't Want to End...)
> 
> Thanks to saraste for typo-hunting!

1\. Sweet tooth

It has been raining for five days straight now, and Nori can see how the fight drains out of his younger brother with each drop of water that tips from the edge of his hood to slip down his sharp nose, with each hour on pony-back hunching his shoulders a bit more as his cloak grows heavier with moisture. No matter how Ori had imagined life on the road being like, Nori doubts he had accounted for being constantly wet. Because it’s impossible to imagine what it feels like to never be properly dry, for days on end, if you have never experienced it yourself

That’s one reason why Nori keeps a special dry stash, wrapped in a bit of oilcloth and tucked inside his coat.

He waits until that evening after supper. Dori still makes an effort at tea, and at least the mug he hands to Nori is warm, even if the contents taste mostly like nettles. He takes a careful sip of the steaming drink and lets the heat seep down his throat, then sets the mug carefully down by his feet.

‘Either of you fancy a dessert?’ he asks, and grins at Dori’s snort and Ori’s wide incredulous eyes. ‘I’ve saved us a little something, courtesy of our esteemed host the Burglar.’ He unwraps the small packet: there are six cookies in all, two for the each of them; buttery and spicy, with currants baked in.

He feels a glare prickling at the back of his neck, and turns to look. It’s the guardsman, the one who’s too tall, too broad in the shoulder for his own good (‘delicious,’ supplies an insidious voice at the back corner of his mind, but Nori pays it no heed). ‘You had your share back then,’ he snaps, ‘should have gotten your own stash when you had the chance.’ He shoves the last cookie into his mouth in two quick bites, and on a whim, licks the crumbs from his fingertips. He can hear Ori stifle a giggle as Dwalin turns away with a huff.

Too little, too late. Nori notes with interest that yes, it _is_ possible to flush all the way to the top of one’s head.

*        *        *

It has been three weeks, at least – Nori is almost certain he has not lost too many days from his count yet. All his little stashes are gone, the rations taste like eating dirt, and the damnable trees just won’t end.

He has the first watch. Everyone else has already turned in as best they can when Dwalin comes over to where Nori’s sitting, back to the camp, staring down the dark and the strange luminous eyes. He likes the eyes better than the critters he can hear but can’t see. The guardsman leans onto the tree beside him, and Nori is just about to tell him to make himself scarce when something is shoved in front of his face.

‘Want the other half?’

Nori blinks. There in Dwalin’s large hand, half wrapped in a plaid handkerchief still, is something that could generously be called a honey cake, like those they had in the skin-changer’s house – or half of one, to be precise, and dried out, and crumbling, but the true stuff nonetheless.

‘Or if you don’t care for it–’

Nori snatches the cake before Dwalin can finish the sentence, and closes his eyes at the taste of nutmeg and allspice melting into the sweetness of honey on his tongue. When he’s done, Dwalin is still standing there, looking expectant, somehow, for all that Nori can’t quite read his face.

‘What do you want for it?’ he snaps, but Dwalin surprises him again.

‘To see that look on your face,’ he laughs and turns to go.

It’s only once he’s alone again with the darkness and the shifting eyes that Nori realizes he never even thanked him.

* * *

 2\. Restless nights 

Ori walks the perimeter of the camp, as he’s been told to, checks in on the skin-changer’s ponies, as he should, and sees that they seem to be asleep on their feet. Then he finds a decent spot to sit, far enough from the dying fire to keep his night-eyes, and gazes out across the darkening plain.

The Western horizon holds a pale glimmer still, and he can still make out the sharp ridges of the mountain range; to the North of the camp there’s a patch of deeper shadow that Ori knows for a copse of stout trees growing wide and close to the ground. East and South hold but the night and its noises. After a while, there’s a sound of some animal passing, but it is too far from him to see, and the grunts and shuffles fade out quickly. Besides, as Ori reasons to himself, it couldn’t have been anything too dangerous, since it didn’t startle the ponies.

He notices when Nori wakes, even if he hardly makes a sound. It’s more like the absence of sound that gives him away, a slight change in the now-familiar sound-scape of the Company asleep. Ori glances over his shoulder, and sees his brother roll over in his blankets. He starts counting slowly under his breath, and gets to fifty-three before he feels a light tap on his shoulder.

‘You go to sleep. I’ll take this watch.’

Ori knows better than to argue on nights like this. The last he sees before tucking into his own bedroll is a dark shape sitting up on the other side of the camp; the last flickering glow from the firepit reflecting dimly from their eyes. He thinks it might be Dwalin.

*        *        *

On their first night in the mountain it’s Dwalin who wakes. It’s still a few hours to the dawn, and the watch has just changed. Ori slips quietly into the hall they’ve taken for camping in, and in the faint light from the doorway behind him, he can’t help noticing how Dwalin tosses and turns in his sleep, silent save for the harsh hiss of his breathing. Then the large dwarf jolts up, like a spring uncoiling, and stays very still and very quiet for a time, before slumping forward, head against his upturned knees.

All told, that’s nothing Nori should not have been able to sleep through, and Ori has known him to sleep unperturbed amidst far worse commotion, but now he sees his brother get up and go to Dwalin. Ori half expects him to get punched for his trouble, but Dwalin clings to him like one drowning. Nori looks straight at him over Dwalin’s shoulder, and Ori backs into the corridor as quiet as he can. 

* * *

 3\. Brothers 

‘Start with the youngest!’ the Goblin King bellows, and Nori doesn’t wait for the command to be put into action. He smacks his head squarely in the nose of the goblin behind him, then launches himself at the next with nothing but fists and boots and speed for weapons, and for a passing moment it seems like plenty enough. From the corner of his eye, Dwalin notices Dori grabbing a tight hold of his youngest brother, but all eyes are on Nori now, and Dwalin is just about to move to the advantage when Thorin puts himself forward, the noble fool, as Dwalin should have known he would.

It takes four goblins to take Nori down, one for each limb, and if not for the Goblin King being more intent to bandy words now, it would soon be him strung up for their amusement, in the place of his young quiet brother.

There was a time Dwalin would have called Nori a fool for such a stunt, but that was before he had done the same himself. He still dreams of that day sometimes, and sometimes he loses more than a bit of an ear at the killing fields of Azanulbizar. Sometimes he’s too slow. Too craven to put himself between his brother and orc-forged crude steel.

*        *        *

‘My goat-riding days are over,’ Balin says as the chariot rattles and creaks beneath them, wargs speeding at the tracks of the weighty cumbersome thing. ‘Durin be with you,’ he says, and Dwalin almost tells him that he cannot, that he _will not_ abandon his brother, his own blood, to go with their king and his heirs, but it’s not in either of them to shirk from a duty, so he grasps tightly at Balin’s forearm and hopes the touch says what he cannot find the words for.

It’s a fate’s cruel joke that it would not have mattered either way whether he stayed or went. Because he’s not enough.

Because he’s the one left standing when the three of them are gone.

The road back to the mountain is the longest he ever took. He feels cold, too hollowed out to think, a brittle-heavy shell carried on leaden feet.

Yet some of that weight falls away at the sight of his brother: living, breathing, standing. Arguing with elves. Trying to forge some order into the mess that comes after a battle.

But he must still look shaken enough, because Balin keeps pushing and prodding at him until he ducks past the flap of a tent to have his hurts seen to. Even if Dwalin says there’s no need, or thinks he says. Or has said. Balin does not listen, so it matters not.

And once inside he sees Nori, shirtless and having his arm sewn back together, his older brother standing not two steps away, lecturing him on how he can take care of himself, thank you very much, and how Nori should have minded his own business, and look where it had got him; a self-repeating litany of concern masked as scolding. Nori does not counter him with a single word, and Dwalin knows that Dori knows he could not have done any different. 

* * *

 4\. Fighting dirty

Watching Dwalin and Nori go hand on hand is not for the faint of heart, Ori thinks as he stands at the ringside in the training grounds, no matter how many times one sees it. (What doesn’t change, though, mountain or no mountain, is the fact that the bets are going before the first blow lands.)

It always starts as it should, as simple sparring, both easily deflecting the moves of the other, circling, testing, waiting.

Then one of them would snap, and it would get _nasty_ between one breath and the next. Ori has seen his own small share of battle by now, and does understand the need for brutality when lives are at stake, yet there seems to be something particularly vicious in the way his brother and the Captain of the Mountain Guard go at each other. Because it’s one thing to see the ear-ripping, eye-gouging, finger-twisting moves applied to a foe in the heat of combat, quite another to see them attempted and deflected by two who are friends, or more than that, if you believe the rumour.

Ori flinches when Dwalin yanks Nori’s head back by the hair, and for a split second he thinks the bout is over – but before Dwalin can land a blow, Nori lets himself fall loose-limbed in his grip, then drives the fingers of one hand hard at Dwalin’s armpit and twists free, leaving a tangle of auburn hair trailing from the Captain’s fingers like fiery spider silk.

They end up with Nori on top, one knee over Dwalin’s windpipe, hands framing his head in a gesture that would be intimate if not for the thumbs poised and ready to put out his eyes.

Dwalin’s palm thumps at the sand twice for submission, and Nori relaxes and leans back. He says something which Ori can’t quite catch, but it makes the Captain laugh, which is not a sound often heard in Erebor rebuilt.

It looks like a caress first, Dwalin’s hand sneaking up on Nori’s thigh, but Ori notices when his brother suddenly stops laughing. ‘Cheat,’ he spits out, but the punch he sends to Dwalin’s shoulder only sets him laughing louder. He lifts his hand off, and Ori catches a gleam of metal in the cup of his palm, a knuckle knife of the kind Nori himself is fond of carrying.

‘You yielded!’ Nori complains loudly and jumps to his feet.

Dwalin clambers up and shrugs. ‘And you’re still dead.’

Ori watches his brother stalk off in a huff as the bets are argued to and fro around the ring.

And it’s not even like Nori himself had never brought a blade to a fisticuff. 

* * *

 5\. No patience for slackers 

‘I expected a report of the doings and goings of your target – not this drivel about how you lost them!’ Nori pushes his hands together and crumples the paper between them. ‘This is not what I’m supposed get from you.’ His voice is soft, but the youngster standing in front of his desk shrinks back half a step before she can check herself.

Dwalin leans his shoulder at the doorframe and thinks back to the training grounds at Ered Luin, and two cocky youngsters, dwarflings in spite of their adult height, and how he’d beaten them over the head with that very same thing if in somewhat different words.

Because this one is good at what she does, but it’s no excuse for being sloppy, more the opposite. By the time Nori’s done with her, she’s close to tears, but her back remains arrow-straight, and the set of her jaw determined when she passes Dwalin at the door. He would bet she’ll do her utmost best next time, if only to prove Nori wrong.

She does, the next time and many times after. Come spring, Nori sends her as a messenger to Rhûn. They hear back from her once, when she’s still only half the way there – then nothing. The roads are long and unpredictable in that corner of the world, so Nori doesn’t think too much of it. Then months pass, and it’s close to a year without a word. The caravan she was supposed to be with arrives earlier than anticipated, but without her.

Dwalin has no heart to tell Nori no news might be good news, because if he ever had an apprentice in all but name, it was her. But when he sends another messenger that summer, Dwalin knows he believes her lost.

However, not long after, they get a word from a caravan that’s yet two weeks away, and the soft look of relief on Nori’s face is something Dwalin never thought he would see over someone who isn’t strictly speaking family.

She looks much as she was, near twenty months past, if more weather-beaten, and she does wear an impressive array of new trinkets woven into her beard, glass beads tinkling against embossed metal every time she turns her head – Dwalin is taken aback before he recognizes Nori’s style of disguise at work: the flashy knick-knacks draw the eye, so that any stranger would have a hard time remembering her face. When she pulls her hood back, however, Dwalin sees she’s also missing a neat half-moon slice at the back of her right ear, and it’s not a recent injury. She catches his look, and barks out a laugh. ‘I’m afraid we match now, Captain, if not out of design,’ she says with a one-shoulder shrug.

She carries little in the form of tangible information, only a handful of short missives Nori sets deciphering at once. His apprentice-who-is-not, however, asks for writing supplies and spends the rest of the day and well into the next creating what she calls ‘draft reports’ but what look to Dwalin’s eye very detailed accounts indeed – or those that Nori lets him read, do. It’s true that she seems to have what Nori once called ‘a memory like a hundred-part strongbox’.

To listen Nori and his young shadow at a council meeting afterwards is an education. Dwalin grins into his beard and thinks that the other clans won’t know what hit them. 

* * *

 Who sleeps in, when given the chance (and who doesn't) 

Nori wakes first, as he would. He stretches out, then tries snuggling close to the warm body beside him, but the sleep won’t be chased down, not even on this morning of all mornings when he would certainly be allowed to laze about. For a moment he contemplates trying to rouse the bed’s other occupant to continue where they left off last night, but Dwalin looks so peaceful in slumber, nearly uncharacteristically so, that Nori has not got the heart to disturb him. He eases out from underneath the covers instead and goes to build up the fire.

By the time Dwalin stirs, Nori has had breakfast and is sitting in the best light, in the room that once served as an office to the head of the Merchants’ Guild, and now is used by the spymaster to the King in a similar capacity. He’s brushing out his hair, not smooth after sleeping-braids but a neglected tangle, while his eyes skim over the columns in the accounts book he’s propped up against the teapot. There’s something underhanded going on here, and it will all unravel, if he only can find a start of the lead to yank at… maybe he should ask Glóin to borrow someone with a better head for numbers, but it’s driving him mad to feel the solution is staring him right in the eye, and he can’t just bloody see it.

‘There’s coffee,’ he says without looking when Dwalin steps into the room, and nods towards the cosy sitting at the far corner of the desk.

Dwalin stops to kiss at his shoulder on the way over. ‘That’s my shirt you’re wearing,’ he mumbles against his skin, and Nori lets his eyes flutter closed, because among all the things that trump account books, Dwalin’s mouth holds a chief place.

‘Couldn’t find where you left mine,’ he replies truthfully, no matter that he had not put in a very thorough search. Because while he has a matching garment in the same pure-flame blue of new beginnings, the one he wears now, while loose enough to fall off his shoulder, is also long enough to warm his knees. Besides, it still smells of his newly-minted husband.

It’s a strange kind of morning when neither of them has nowhere they absolutely need to be if they don’t wish to. A rare kind of treat to watch Dwalin sip his black poison of a drink and climb into wakefulness a bit at a time instead of snapping dutifully to instant alertness at the crack of dawn.

‘You’re not thinking of the toll fraud, are you?’ Dwalin asks, and startles a laugh out of Nori. ‘Because you’d worry me if you did, with that look on your face.’

‘And what look would that be?’

‘The one that ends with one of us on their knees.’

Now, there are many things that might excuse them from what happens next. Dwalin parading around only in his smalls would be one. The morning being the first after their wedding another.

In any case, the desk holds up admirably under the assault, and dodgy accounts can hardly become any worse for being splattered with coffee.

**Author's Note:**

> The idea for pure flame blue used to symbolically represent new beginnings, such as weddings, is shamelessly stolen from inkling's story [Knapped Flint](http://archiveofourown.org/works/613800/chapters/1106559). PLEASE note that it's not a story for everyone, and DO mind the tags.


End file.
